OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hacking, The Lazy Way: LLM Augmented Pentesting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

In our research, we introduce a new concept called "LLM Augmented Pentesting" demonstrated with a tool named "Pentest Copilot," that revolutionizes the field of ethical hacking by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into penetration testing workflows, leveraging the advanced GPT-4-turbo model. Our approach focuses on overcoming the traditional resistance to automation in penetration testing by employing LLMs to automate specific sub-tasks while ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the overall testing process. Pentest Copilot showcases remarkable proficiency in tasks such as utilizing testing tools, interpreting outputs, and suggesting follow-up actions, efficiently bridging the gap between automated systems and human expertise. By integrating a "chain of thought" mechanism, Pentest Copilot optimizes token usage and enhances decision-making processes, leading to more accurate and context-aware outputs. Additionally, our implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) minimizes hallucinations and ensures the tool remains aligned with the latest cybersecurity techniques and knowledge. We also highlight a unique infrastructure system that supports in-browser penetration testing, providing a robust platform for cybersecurity professionals. Our findings demonstrate that LLM Augmented Pentesting can not only significantly enhance task completion rates in penetration testing but also effectively addresses real-world challenges, marking a substantial advancement in the cybersecurity domain.
ASR Error Correction using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Error correction (EC) models play a crucial role in refining Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcriptions, enhancing the readability and quality of transcriptions. Without requiring access to the underlying code or model weights, EC can improve performance and provide domain adaptation for black-box ASR systems. This work investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for error correction across diverse scenarios. 1-best ASR hypotheses are commonly used as the input to EC models. We propose building high-performance EC models using ASR N-best lists which should provide more contextual information for the correction process. Additionally, the generation process of a standard EC model is unrestricted in the sense that any output sequence can be generated. For some scenarios, such as unseen domains, this flexibility may impact performance. To address this, we introduce a constrained decoding approach based on the N-best list or an ASR lattice. Finally, most EC models are trained for a specific ASR system requiring retraining whenever the underlying ASR system is changed. This paper explores the ability of EC models to operate on the output of different ASR systems. This concept is further extended to zero-shot error correction using LLMs, such as ChatGPT. Experiments on three standard datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods for both Transducer and attention-based encoder-decoder ASR systems. In addition, the proposed method can serve as an effective method for model ensembling.
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Tree search methods have demonstrated impressive performance in code generation. Previous methods combine tree search with reflection that summarizes past mistakes to achieve iterative improvement. However, these methods face significant challenges. First, they search directly within the code language space, neglecting the underlying reasoning process critical for effective code generation. Second, reflection-based approaches merely accumulate historical errors in memory without providing correct reasoning pathways, making it difficult for subsequent search iterations to identify optimal solutions, resulting in decreased search quality. In this work, we propose RethinkMCTS, a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation. Specifically, we employ MCTS to search for thoughts before code generation and integrate MCTS with a refinement mechanism called rethink, which incorporates fine-grained code execution feedback to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. It ensures the search path aligns with better reasoning, improving overall search quality. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RethinkMCTS outperforms previous search-based and feedback-enhanced code generation baselines.
AACessTalk: Fostering Communication between Minimally Verbal Autistic Children and Parents with Contextual Guidance and Card Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

As minimally verbal autistic (MVA) children communicate with parents through few words and nonverbal cues, parents often struggle to encourage their children to express subtle emotions and needs and to grasp their nuanced signals. We present AACessTalk, a tablet-based, AI-mediated communication system that facilitates meaningful exchanges between an MVA child and a parent. AACessTalk provides real-time guides to the parent to engage the child in conversation and, in turn, recommends contextual vocabulary cards to the child. Through a two-week deployment study with 11 MVA child-parent dyads, we examine how AACessTalk fosters everyday conversation practice and mutual engagement. Our findings show high engagement from all dyads, leading to increased frequency of conversation and turn-taking. AACessTalk also encouraged parents to explore their own interaction strategies and empowered the children to have more agency in communication. We discuss the implications of designing technologies for balanced communication dynamics in parent-MVA child interaction.
Nebula: Efficient, Private and Accurate Histogram Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

We present \textit{Nebula}, a system for differentially private histogram estimation on data distributed among clients. \textit{Nebula} allows clients to independently decide whether to participate in the system, and locally encode their data so that an untrusted server only learns data values whose multiplicity exceeds a predefined aggregation threshold, with $(\varepsilon,δ)$ differential privacy guarantees. Compared to existing systems, \textit{Nebula} uniquely achieves: \textit{i)} a strict upper bound on client privacy leakage; \textit{ii)} significantly higher utility than standard local differential privacy systems; and \textit{iii)} no requirement for trusted third-parties, multi-party computation, or trusted hardware. We provide a formal evaluation of \textit{Nebula}'s privacy, utility and efficiency guarantees, along with an empirical assessment on three real-world datasets. On the United States Census dataset, clients can submit their data in just 0.0036 seconds and 0.0016 MB (\textbf{efficient}), under strong $(\varepsilon=1,δ=10^{-8})$ differential privacy guarantees (\textbf{private}), enabling \textit{Nebula}'s untrusted aggregation server to estimate histograms with over 88\% better utility than existing local differential privacy deployments (\textbf{accurate}). Additionally, we describe a variant that allows clients to submit multi-dimensional data, with similar privacy, utility, and performance. Finally, we provide an implementation of \textit{Nebula}.
Generative Semantic Communication via Textual Prompts: Latency Performance Tradeoffs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

This paper develops an edge-device collaborative Generative Semantic Communications (Gen SemCom) framework leveraging pre-trained Multi-modal/Vision Language Models (M/VLMs) for ultra-low-rate semantic communication via textual prompts. The proposed framework optimizes the use of M/VLMs on the wireless edge/device to generate high-fidelity textual prompts through visual captioning/question answering, which are then transmitted over a wireless channel for SemCom. Specifically, we develop a multi-user Gen SemCom framework using pre-trained M/VLMs, and formulate a joint optimization problem of prompt generation offloading, communication and computation resource allocation to minimize the latency and maximize the resulting semantic quality. Due to the nonconvex nature of the problem with highly coupled discrete and continuous variables, we decompose it as a two-level problem and propose a low-complexity swap/leaving/joining (SLJ)-based matching algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvements over the conventional semanticunaware/non-collaborative offloading benchmarks.
Causal Inference with Large Language Model: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Causal inference has been a pivotal challenge across diverse domains such as medicine and economics, demanding a complicated integration of human knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and data mining capabilities. Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), particularly with the advent of large language models (LLMs), have introduced promising opportunities for traditional causal inference tasks. This paper reviews recent progress in applying LLMs to causal inference, encompassing various tasks spanning different levels of causation. We summarize the main causal problems and approaches, and present a comparison of their evaluation results in different causal scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss key findings and outline directions for future research, underscoring the potential implications of integrating LLMs in advancing causal inference methodologies.
Learning Agile Swimming: An End-to-End Approach without CPGs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The pursuit of agile and efficient underwater robots, especially bio-mimetic robotic fish, has been impeded by challenges in creating motion controllers that are able to fully exploit their hydrodynamic capabilities. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a novel, model-free, end-to-end control framework that leverages Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to enable agile and energy-efficient swimming of robotic fish. Unlike existing methods that rely on predefined trigonometric swimming patterns like Central Pattern Generators (CPG), our approach directly outputs low-level actuator commands without strong constraints, enabling the robotic fish to learn agile swimming behaviors. In addition, by integrating a high-performance Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulator with innovative sim-to-real strategies, such as normalized density calibration and servo response calibration, the proposed framework significantly mitigates the sim-to-real gap, facilitating direct transfer of control policies to real-world environments without fine-tuning. Comparative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves faster swimming speeds, smaller turn-around radii, and reduced energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art swimming controllers. Furthermore, the proposed framework shows promise in addressing complex tasks, paving the way for more effective deployment of robotic fish in real aquatic environments.
AttnMod: Attention-Based New Art Styles
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce AttnMod, a training-free technique that modulates cross-attention in pre-trained diffusion models to generate novel, unpromptable art styles. The method is inspired by how a human artist might reinterpret a generated image, for example by emphasizing certain features, dispersing color, twisting silhouettes, or materializing unseen elements. AttnMod simulates this intent by altering how the text prompt conditions the image through attention during denoising. These targeted modulations enable diverse stylistic transformations without changing the prompt or retraining the model, and they expand the expressive capacity of text-to-image generation.
Audio-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Head-Orientation in Naturalistic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches in audio signal processing have seen substantial progress in recent years, audio-driven DRL for tasks such as navigation, gaze control and head-orientation control in the context of human-robot interaction have received little attention. Here, we propose an audio-driven DRL framework in which we utilise deep Q-learning to develop an autonomous agent that orients towards a talker in the acoustic environment based on stereo speech recordings. Our results show that the agent learned to perform the task at a near perfect level when trained on speech segments in anechoic environments (that is, without reverberation). The presence of reverberation in naturalistic acoustic environments affected the agent's performance, although the agent still substantially outperformed a baseline, randomly acting agent. Finally, we quantified the degree of generalization of the proposed DRL approach across naturalistic acoustic environments. Our experiments revealed that policies learned by agents trained on medium or high reverb environments generalized to low reverb environments, but policies learned by agents trained on anechoic or low reverb environments did not generalize to medium or high reverb environments. Taken together, this study demonstrates the potential of audio-driven DRL for tasks such as head-orientation control and highlights the need for training strategies that enable robust generalization across environments for real-world audio-driven DRL applications.
DAE-Fuse: An Adaptive Discriminative Autoencoder for Multi-Modality Image Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In extreme scenarios such as nighttime or low-visibility environments, achieving reliable perception is critical for applications like autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. Multi-modality image fusion, particularly integrating infrared imaging, offers a robust solution by combining complementary information from different modalities to enhance scene understanding and decision-making. However, current methods face significant limitations: GAN-based approaches often produce blurry images that lack fine-grained details, while AE-based methods may introduce bias toward specific modalities, leading to unnatural fusion results. To address these challenges, we propose DAE-Fuse, a novel two-phase discriminative autoencoder framework that generates sharp and natural fused images. Furthermore, We pioneer the extension of image fusion techniques from static images to the video domain while preserving temporal consistency across frames, thus advancing the perceptual capabilities required for autonomous navigation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that DAE-Fuse achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, with superior generalizability to tasks like medical image fusion.
Human Insights Driven Latent Space for Different Driving Perspectives: A Unified Encoder for Efficient Multi-Task Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Autonomous driving systems require a comprehensive understanding of the environment, achieved by extracting visual features essential for perception, planning, and control. However, models trained solely on single-task objectives or generic datasets often lack the contextual information needed for robust performance in complex driving scenarios. In this work, we propose a unified encoder trained on multiple computer vision tasks crucial for urban driving, including depth, pose, and 3D scene flow estimation, as well as semantic, instance, panoptic, and motion segmentation. By integrating these diverse visual cues-similar to human perceptual mechanisms-the encoder captures rich features that enhance navigation-related predictions. We evaluate the model on steering estimation as a downstream task, leveraging its dense latent space. To ensure efficient multi-task learning, we introduce a multi-scale feature network for pose estimation and apply knowledge distillation from a multi-backbone teacher model. Our findings highlight two key findings: (1) the unified encoder achieves competitive performance across all visual perception tasks, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities; and (2) for steering estimation, the frozen unified encoder-leveraging dense latent representations-outperforms both its fine-tuned counterpart and the same frozen model pretrained on generic datasets like ImageNet. These results underline the significance of task-specific visual features and demonstrate the promise of multi-task learning in advancing autonomous driving systems. More details and the pretrained model are available at https://hi-computervision.github.io/uni-encoder/.
Robust Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Distortion Risk Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, the agent's optimal strategy heavily depends on her risk preferences and the underlying model dynamics of the training environment. These two aspects influence the agent's ability to make well-informed and time-consistent decisions when facing testing environments. In this work, we devise a framework to solve robust risk-aware RL problems where we simultaneously account for environmental uncertainty and risk with a class of dynamic robust distortion risk measures. Robustness is introduced by considering all models within a Wasserstein ball around a reference model. We estimate such dynamic robust risk measures using neural networks by making use of strictly consistent scoring functions, derive policy gradient formulae using the quantile representation of distortion risk measures, and construct an actor-critic algorithm to solve this class of robust risk-aware RL problems. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on a portfolio allocation example.
AALF: Almost Always Linear Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Recent works for time-series forecasting more and more leverage the high predictive power of Deep Learning models. With this increase in model complexity, however, comes a lack in understanding of the underlying model decision process, which is problematic for high-stakes application scenarios. At the same time, simple, interpretable forecasting methods such as ARIMA still perform very well, sometimes on-par, with Deep Learning approaches. We argue that simple models are good enough most of the time, and that forecasting performance could be improved by choosing a Deep Learning method only for few, important predictions, increasing the overall interpretability of the forecasting process. In this context, we propose a novel online model selection framework which learns to identify these predictions. An extensive empirical study on various real-world datasets shows that our selection methodology performs comparable to state-of-the-art online model selections methods in most cases while being significantly more interpretable. We find that almost always choosing a simple autoregressive linear model for forecasting results in competitive performance, suggesting that the need for opaque black-box models in time-series forecasting might be smaller than recent works would suggest.
ASMA: An Adaptive Safety Margin Algorithm for Vision-Language Drone Navigation via Scene-Aware Control Barrier Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

In the rapidly evolving field of vision-language navigation (VLN), ensuring safety for physical agents remains an open challenge. For a human-in-the-loop language-operated drone to navigate safely, it must understand natural language commands, perceive the environment, and simultaneously avoid hazards in real time. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are formal methods that enforce safe operating conditions. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an optimization framework that plans a sequence of future actions over a prediction horizon, ensuring smooth trajectory tracking while obeying constraints. In this work, we consider a VLN-operated drone platform and enhance its safety by formulating a novel scene-aware CBF that leverages ego-centric observations from a camera which has both Red-Green-Blue as well as Depth (RGB-D) channels. A CBF-less baseline system uses a Vision-Language Encoder with cross-modal attention to convert commands into an ordered sequence of landmarks. An object detection model identifies and verifies these landmarks in the captured images to generate a planned path. To further enhance safety, an Adaptive Safety Margin Algorithm (ASMA) is proposed. ASMA tracks moving objects and performs scene-aware CBF evaluation on-the-fly, which serves as an additional constraint within the MPC framework. By continuously identifying potentially risky observations, the system performs prediction in real time about unsafe conditions and proactively adjusts its control actions to maintain safe navigation throughout the trajectory. Deployed on a Parrot Bebop2 quadrotor in the Gazebo environment using the Robot Operating System (ROS), ASMA achieves 64%-67% increase in success rates with only a slight increase (1.4%-5.8%) in trajectory lengths compared to the baseline CBF-less VLN.
Safe and Real-Time Consistent Planning for Autonomous Vehicles in Partially Observed Environments via Parallel Consensus Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Ensuring safety and driving consistency is a significant challenge for autonomous vehicles operating in partially observed environments. This work introduces a consistent parallel trajectory optimization (CPTO) approach to enable safe and consistent driving in dense obstacle environments with perception uncertainties. Utilizing discrete-time barrier function theory, we develop a consensus safety barrier module that ensures reliable safety coverage within the spatiotemporal trajectory space across potential obstacle configurations. Following this, a bi-convex parallel trajectory optimization problem is derived that facilitates decomposition into a series of low-dimensional quadratic programming problems to accelerate computation. By leveraging the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for parallel optimization, each generated candidate trajectory corresponds to a possible environment configuration while sharing a common consensus trajectory segment. This ensures driving safety and consistency when executing the consensus trajectory segment for the ego vehicle in real time. We validate our CPTO framework through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines across multiple driving tasks in partially observable environments. Our results demonstrate improved safety and consistency using both synthetic and real-world traffic datasets.
Execution-time opacity control for timed automata
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Timing leaks in timed automata (TA) can occur whenever an attacker is able to deduce a secret by observing some timed behaviour. In execution-time opacity, the attacker aims at deducing whether a private location was visited, by observing only the execution time. In earlier work, it was shown that it can be decided whether a TA is opaque in this setting. In this work, we address control, and investigate whether a TA can be controlled by a strategy at runtime to ensure opacity, by enabling or disabling some controllable actions over time. We first show that, in general, it is undecidable to determine whether such a strategy exists. Second, we show that deciding whether a meta-strategy ensuring opacity exists can be done in EXPSPACE. Such a meta-strategy is a set of strategies allowing an arbitrarily large -- yet finite -- number of strategy changes per time unit, and with only weak ordering relations between such changes. Our method is constructive, in the sense that we can exhibit such a meta-strategy. We also extend our method to the case of weak opacity, when it is harmless that the attacker deduces that the private location was not visited. Finally, we consider a variant where the attacker cannot have an infinite precision in its observations.